Why are incels so obsessed with other men’s semen? The answer is much darker than you think

Right-wing shitposters aren’t the only ones who like to call everyone a “cuck.” Quite a few incels are fond of the insult as well, though in their minds it’s less of an insult than a description of the typical straight man — and they mean it quite literally.

No, the incels don’t mean that every single woman in a heterosexual relationship is getting it on with other men on the side, with her partner’s permission or not, though most incels seem to believe this is pretty much the norm.

Rather, the incels have expanded the definition of “cuckold” to include every man who has sex with a girl or a woman who isn’t a virgin. In other words, if a woman has ever had sex with a man other than the one she’s currently with, she’s basically cucking her current man as much as if she were to have sex with another man right in her boyfriend or husband’s bed while he watches, humiliated.

Given that these guys — the incels, that is — aren’t currently getting laid, and many never have, you might think their peculiar obsession with what you might call “universal cuckoldry” stems from pure sour grapes. And to some degree this is undoubtedly true. If you’re “involuntarily celibate,” as these guys insist upon labeling themselves, redefining most heterosexual sex as something deeply degrading to the men involved in it is likely going to make you feel a bit better about yourself.

But alas, there’s much more than sour grapes going on here. The incel obsession with what they see as almost universal cuckoldry isn’t just a “cope” for them; t’s a way to demonize women for having normal sex lives, to redefine all sexually active women as evil, deceptive monsters who can never fully love a man because they’re always pining for the alpha Chad they once had (because of course every women has supposedly slept with an alpha Chad, or several dozen, in her younger years). (In these incel discussions, I should note, they’re pretty much only considering straight sex between cis partners; incels do think and talk about trans women, but that’s a whole other topic, probably worth a dozen posts on its own.)

This demonization of sexually active women also helps to cement incels’ weird fascination with other men’s semen — something that many of them seem to think about more often and urgently than actual cuckold fetishists or bukkake fans, though incels insist that they are disgusted by semen, not desirous of it, and I actually think most of them are. (Many of them are disgusted by their own semen as well.) By fixating on what they see as the inherent ickiness of sperm, they can demonize women as not only deceptive cuckoldresses but as deeply disgusting, sperm-hungry animals in thrall to their primal Chad-cock-lust.

If you do a search for “semen” on the Incels.is forum — and I wouldn’t recommend it — you’ll turn up countless discussions with titles like these. (Click for archived versions of the original discussions; NSFW ads.)

As is virtually always the case when men demonize the sexuality of the women they themselves desire, the incels’ inverted cuckold fetish is ultimately all about control. They don’t just want to have sex with women; they want to be the only ones who have ever had sex with these women. They don’t want their partners to be able to compare them to anyone else. They don’t want their partners to feel they have any other options. This, as much as the pedophilia (sorry, ephebophilia) rampant in incel circles, accounts for their fixation on female virgins.

You can see all of these different elements at play in one discussion started by one prolific Incels.is commenter — with more than 4000 posts to his name — warning his fellow incels of the allegedly horrible fate that awaits men “If Your Wife has has [sic] Sex with Another Man Before You.” (NSFW link.) His warning takes the form of a 10-point list. Let’s go through it.

If your future wife is one of these nasty women, he declares:

1. She has been throttled and tossed around by someone that isn’t you.2. She has squirmed with pleasure under the control of someone that isn’t you.3. She has had her first experience, satisfying her curiosity, with someone that isn’t you.

Here’s that fear of comparison.

4. She has developed emotional bonds with someone that isn’t you.

More fear of comparison. It’s an incel folk belief — backed up with some dubious science — that any woman who has loved one man will never fully love another. (This belief is widespread in the manosphere and everywhere else evo psych is worshipped.)

5. She has been drenched in the semen of someone that isn’t you.

Here’s that vivid incel imagination at work again. Yes, fellas, if she’s had sex with another man, she has almost certainly encountered another man’s semen in some fashion. Whether she has been “drenched” in it is a whole other question. And it’s really none of your business.

6. She has willingly put herself under the possibility of having the kids of someone that isn’t you.

And, if she’s not already a mother, she has almost certainly done everything in her power to avoid this possibility every time she has had sex. But again, her sexual past is really none of your damn business.

7. She potentially still has remnants of semen inside of her from someone that isn’t you.

Uh, not unless she had unprotected sex with the best man right before saying “I do.” Not if she had sex with another man a year ago. Because That’s Not How Vaginas Work.

8. She may give birth to the child of someone who isn’t you.

This is number six again, but this time with the added worry that women will secretly saddle hapless beta men with responsibility for children that aren’t biologically theirs. Incels, like Men’s Rights Activists and many other manosphereans, assume that paternity fraud is rampant — because most women want alpha DNA, but can’t get alpha males to marry them. So they have unprotected sex with alphas and make their beta husbands think the kid is theirs. Many manosphereans literally believe that most men are unwittingly raising other men’s children.

Like I said, these guys have vivid imaginations.

9. She has gasped in pleasure and pain due to the penetration from someone who isn’t you.

And we’re back to the fear of comparison again, as well as a tacit admission that most incels are destined to suck at sex and know it.

10. She has bled on the sheets due to the penetration of someone who isn’t you.

You have to be a pretty big virgin fetishist — or a vampire — to see missing out on this as something inherently terrible. And hey, if you’re really that into blood, there’s always period sex!

Naturally, only one of the numerous incels commenting in this thread took issue with any o f these claims. Most agreed and amplified the OP’s points.

“Another quality post,” wrote the first responder.

[W]hile you provide for her she is thinking about all the Chad cock she took in her prime. She cannot truly love you.

One commenter managed to push the definition of cuckold even further than the already quite expansive incel definition, suggesting that the problem wasn’t just the men that one’s hypothetical wife had slept with in reality, but also those she simply thought about having sex with. “Everyone wants a virgin wife,” he wrote, as if this were self-evidently true.

The thing is: would you be OK knowing that your wife is at least fantasying in getting fucked by a Chad?

Dude. You’re jealous of her thoughts now?

Other responses were less pathetic than chilling. Several commenters declared that the OP was “rage fuel.” Others expressed their rage quite openly.

“This is precisely why they should be property,’ wrote someone calling himself SaintMarcLepine, after the misogynist who murdered murdered 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989. (The admins of Incels.is apparently have no issue with SaintMarcLepine’s handle or his violently misogynistic comments; he has been allowed to post more than 1600 comments on the site and its predecessor, Incels.me.)

A commenter called Krispenwah threatened violence explicitly. “If I get arranged marriage and she doesn’t bleed after I first time I fuck her,” he wrote, “I will kill her instantly.”

It’s comments like this that lead me to conclude that the real tragedy isn’t that incels like those who populate Incels.is aren’t getting laid. The tragedy would be if any of them did. Unless they can work through whatever inner demons are leading them to think and to post things like these, these men are dangerous to any women who dates much less marries them — or even simply attracts their obsessive attention.

They’re also dangerous to the rest of us. As I’ve said many times before, the incel ideology is utter poison. Sites like Incels.is aren’t self-help groups any more than sites like Gab or Stormfront are self-help sites for racists. As those sites have served as enablers of racist extremism — which regularly bleeds into real-life violence, as we have all been reminded so tragically in recent days — so sites like Incels.is are enablers or misogynist extremism. And, like White Supremacists, incels don’t just fantasize about violence and murder. Some of them have committed it.

That’s why these weird bad ideas on the internet are worth looking at seriously. Because ideas, good and bad, have consequences. The ideas being spread every day on Incels.is put all of us in danger.

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Comments

Seems like they’ve latched on to the worst ideas in fundamentalist Christianity. It’s like those weird analogies about women who’ve had sex being sellotape that’s lost it’s stickyness.
Couldn’t they have hung onto the Christmas carols instead of the misogyny?

These men watch way too much porn. They talk about sex like a degrading porn video and their descriptions of women are so far from the reality and lived experiences of women, how we think and what we feel, that it’s laughable. Of course, that’s to be expected with people with no women friends or lovers (the ignorance, not the hate part, which is just inexcusable). 😐

It’s like those weird analogies about women who’ve had sex being sellotape that’s lost it’s stickyness.

And isn’t it amazing that women who have sex before marriage lose their “stickiness” — but the ones who have sex with their husbands retain this stickiness? How can that be? Have scientists figured this out?

Yeah, I think there’s a huge crossover between the Incels and the Internet Turbo Rationalists, but there’s been another trend among the alt-right and the atheist diaspora. I’ve read more than one account of atheists deciding to drop their atheism and tend into “traditional Christianity” – not out of some sort of conviction, but for purely bigoted reasons. Feeling like they had to start believing because “that’s the faith that built Western Civilization” or whatever nonsense. (I mean, let’s be clear here, it’s because it gives them stronger justification for their bigotry; far easier to hate when God tells you you’re supposed to.)

But I dunno if that’s a trend or not, I still know a turbo-atheist or two who are alt-right, and I’m sure atheism is a trend in the Incel sump. I don’t really want to go in and look :\. Too gross.

I’m not sure if the Atheism matters more than the ridiculous turbo-rationality though, because as far as I can tell that’s the common thread in all of them. Incels, Alt-Right, Lobsterians, MRAs, etc, etc – the common thread is that they’re all incredibly smart with their man-logics and therefore should be the inheritors of the earth. Real smarts, or a shred of humility, not required.

Pride goeth before a fall, etc, etc. Must avoid that pitfall ourselves.

Ugh. It’s clear by now that, under his mild-mannered persona, JP is a seething mass of barely controlled rage. That he apparently finds this normal and used to be a practicing psychologist is so alarming. At least he was kind enough to stick a reminder in there that he has decided to die of scurvy. It lightens the mood of his journalist beating fantasy a bit.

Based on some data collected from Okcupid as well as the words of at least 10 women I’ve talked to IRL, most(read > 50%) of women aged 20 and up actively do not want their potential partners to be a virgin. I’ve heard one say that unless it’s by choice / against your religion to have premarital sex, any mais virgin who is over the age of 30 is SOOL. The idea is that if you’re truly involuntarily celebate, there is clearly something about you that makes you unattractive. Now before you try to tell me that it’s all because of their attitude.

Sex is neither a right nor is it fair in any way shape or form!

But I digress…

I think that most people prefer to date someone with similar sexual experience. Women are often willing to date men with more experience than themselves but often get frustrated and turned off by men who have significantly less sexual experience than themselves. I think these incels should be more willing to date non virgins who have very little experience but it is sensible for them to avoid sexually active women who have a lot of notches under their belts. Because these guys are unqualified due to their lack of experience.

“Less pathetic than chilling” no, they’re all definitely still pathetic. One of the things they (and so many of their fellow travelers) are so mad about is not getting the respect they think they deserve.

I can’t help but think comprehensive sex-ed that is honest about biology and doesn’t portray pseudo religious misogynistic myths like women’s bodies being permanently soiled or defiled (or changed at all) by sex, or virgins with obstructive hymens bleeding after sex (or the idea that pain and bleeding should ever happen if everything is going correctly)… would help us ALL quite a lot.

The age of these guys, at least part of this is Bush’s “abstinence-only” legacy, right here.

Well, I just did the math. After reading “how many liters of semen do average Stacy take yearly” I said “LITERS?” and questioned if it was even possible. So first, the average amount of ejaculate is 2.5 ml. And we all know that there is 1000 milliliters in a liter. Dividing that by 2.5 you get the number 400. FOUR HUNDRED. Soooo….. 400. So that man was assuming the “average Stacy” is ingesting MORE than 400 spurts of spooge in a year. Honestly, I doubt even porn stars encounter a liter’s worth within a year.

Chris Benoit was athletic, hypermuscular, famous (within his subculture of chest-beating performative masculinity), and apparently personable (before the braintrauma got to him); Nancy Benoit was quite conventionally attractive; by the usual rules of incel taxonomy, how does he avoid being a Stacy-snatching Chad?

Based on some data collected from Okcupid as well as the words of at least 10 women I’ve talked to IRL, most(read > 50%) of women aged 20 and up actively do not want their potential partners to be a virgin.

That sounds odd. I can’t exactly speak from experience, since among my top criteria for a partner would be “does not want to have sex with me” (I’m ace, and moderately sex-repulsed), but even then I don’t really care if the man or woman has prior sexual experience or not. It’s a matter of what kind of physical relationship is going to occur between us that I’m concerned about- what happened with other people isn’t really any of my business.

I’d think that most women, and indeed, most people in general (when looking for long-term partners, at least) would care about things like compatibility and personality and interests long before they’d worry about whether someone has used their genitals on someone else. How would you even know if someone is a virgin when you start out dating them? Do allosexual people often immediately discuss their previous sexual history with each other? That sounds really weird.

I guess if you’re looking for casual sex, you might want someone who knows what they’re doing, though. So I guess in that axis virginal dudes have some difficulties?

I mean, if the dude is constantly whining about how he can’t get any women to have sex with him, then, yeah, that’s going to set off some massive red flags. Not because the guy is a virgin but because he’s clearly allowing that arbitrary social construct to warp his perspective on life, and will more than likely see any woman as a potential means to an end, instead of, y’know, a person.

JP is rage personified, especially towards people who criticise him. He’s still threatening to beat up Pankaj Mishra from an article written months ago, for example.
Listen to him in this short clip, where he’s asked about academics who’ve objected to his views:

Which is exactly why not only is proper sex ed important, but also internet literacy. I was watching a Three Arrows video on how people fall down into these cesspools of anti-feminism and “anti-SJWism” in general. Because these people don’t find this toxic stew out of the blue. What starts on 4chan goes to 8chan, goes to Wizardchan, goes to YouTube and goes to Reddit and so on.

I kinda wish that the rest of our society would pick up on this so we can offer some guidance to young people that live on the internet.

I’ve been reading this blog for a while, but the parallels to Christian purity culture really caught me off-guard here. In evangelical circles premarital sex is considered to be infidelity to your future spouse, and fantasizing is nearly as bad as committing the actual act. It’s drilled into all young women that the only person you can truly love is the first person you have sex with, and if you end up marrying someone else it won’t ever be right because you’ve already given away the piece of yourself that you need to truly love your husband. Women are to never even imagine sex until the day they’re married.

This is directed only at women – so is the Incel subculture just the man’s side of purity culture? A man in evangelical circles is raised to believe that his future wife belongs to him in a literal sense even before they have met, and if she has experiences with any other man he has been defrauded. Seriously – they actually call it “fraud” against the future spouse because the woman has cheated him of his rights to 100% of her sexuality. Regardless of whether they’ve actually met. So if you are raised to believe this, and then realize that the world just doesn’t work that way, you’d have exactly an Incel’s set of complaints.

This isn’t just a fringe Christian sect I’m talking about here – this is every evangelical church I’ve attended. A huge chunk of America is steeped in these concepts. This is chilling.

@Scildfreja Unnyðnes: “Internet Turbo Rationalist” is my new favourite phrase though I suspect it makes them sound a whole lot cooler than they are 😂

(To add to the confusion, the newest ingredient in this ideological stew, Jordan Peterson, is actually a Christian though he keeps that noticeably under his hat. Presumably so as not to offend his newfound source of lovely, lovely Patreon subsidies…)

“The admins of Incels.is apparently have no issue with SaintMarcLepine’s handle or his violently misogynistic comments; he has been allowed to post more than 1600 comments on the site and its predecessor, Incels.me.”

Not surprising at all, given how many incels openly worship Elliot Rodger. They don’t just tolerate mass killer incels – they celebrate them.

There’s also microchimerism which – apologies if I’ve missed – hasn’t been covered on WHTM yet but which seems to be a growing thing in the Incel and Alt-Right more generally, as it combines fear of being ‘cucked’ with various nasty racial ideas.

Microchimerism – where people may have a small number of cells happily growing in their body which have a different genetic code – is definitely a real thing, and can happen for a lot of reasons because biology is really messy: pregnancy leaves behind cells from the child which can move throughout the body, children may carry some viable cells from their mother or even an older sibling, and microchimerism is on a spectrum with full-blown genetic mosaicism, where an individual can be composed of two distinct genetic signatures because they are the result of one blastocyst absorbing another.

This is based on a single line in one paper speculating about the origins of male microchimerism in women who have never been pregnant:
“Another possibility that has not been investigated is whether male DNA can be detected in a woman’s circulation from sexual intercourse without pregnancy.”

It should be noted that in addition to being pure speculation by the researchers with no mechanism listed, the paper lists three other possibilities, including: that the women in question *had* been pregnant but not realised it (due to early miscarriage), that they may have absorbed a male twin in the womb, and that an older brother may have left viable cell lines in the mother’s womb.

You can obviously see the concern here – if you have sex with a woman who is Not A Virgin(tm) her body could be literally strewn with the genes of her previous amores. And that’s pretty gay. And the resulting children might really be the children of one of the men whose genes are floating around in the mother (as far as I can see this is utterly inane speculation on their part). Some go as far as saying that women who have sex with a man of another race will have children who may exhibit some of the traits of that race, in a sort of bizarre Lysenkoism.

I literally am at a loss for words. What is wrong with these people? How can their thinking be so skewed? No sex isn’t the problem. These people would be psychologically deranged even if they were getting laid. This kind of thinking makes me sick to my stomach. Clearly these people are living in a world of delusion. Maybe if yall weren’t such egotistical utter weirdos you would find a girl, but like the author of the article states, at this point you and everybody else are better off if you stay a lonely virgin. Fucking sickos.

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